Muskrat trapping
An accidental annual tradition; also, thoughts on uncertainty
Into, and out of, the window well
We’ve now gone two years in a row accidentally trapping a muskrat in the basement window well at the back of my house.
If I were a 19th-century fur trapper, this would be amazing news. Payday! Also, stew. Muskrats are hefty boys.
As a 21st-century suburbanite, however, it mostly means, “the screen covering my basement window is destroyed,” and also, “my dog is terrified the window well.” On the other hand: It’s an anecdote. And I do like living among critters.
Gus happened to see the muskrat this time and has been extremely cautious of the window well ever since. My friend’s dog Harvey had the opposite response and tried to eat it.
I got both dogs out of the backyard, sloped a piece of 4-by-4 wood into the window well as a ramp—exactly as I had last year—and left wee(ish) beastie to reflect on its options. It was gone the next time I checked.
Mostly I’m curious whether it was the same muskrat both times. If yes… buddy. Look at your life. Look at your choices.
If not, why are large aquatic rodents drawn to my window well? And should I take up fur trapping?
Janet Vaughan: Care in a dark century
I recently mentioned really enjoying the book Metaphysical Animals (about Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley and Philippa Foot). That crew frequently inhabits my thoughts. But I bring the book up now because it introduced me (obliquely) to the hematologist Janet Vaughan.
Vaughan, a medical doctor, was the principal of Somerville College at Oxford in the 1950s. In Metaphysical Animals, she’s mentioned briefly, thus1:
… in October 1957, the whole of Somerville College came down with flu. Philippa Foot, the college’s philosophy lecturer, took to her bed in 16 Park Town, a hot water bottle, a heap of handkerchiefs, and a box of expensive chocolates—part of her staple diet—close at hand.
She was used to working under the eiderdown, having spent most of her final year as the undergraduate Miss Bosanquet confined to bed through the recurrence of a childhood illness. Now, she set to work on a very important letter.
Dear Janet, she began.
The addressee was Mrs. Janet Vaughan, a hematologist and principal of Somerville College. The week that President Truman had been told of the existence of the atomic bomb, Janet Vaughan had been, in her own words, “trying to do science in hell.” She had been sent by the Medical Research Council to the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to advise on the safest way to feed people on the verge of dying from starvation.
Now, she had returned to Oxford to research the effects of radiation on the human skeleton. She would soon be recognized as a world authority.
This introduction stunned me. It was like reading an extremely bleak variation on a Forrest Gump-type biography, in which someone’s been dragged into all the worst man-made horrors of the 20th century. Bergen-Belsen and then the threat of nuclear radiation poisoning? What a life.
I read this Longreads essay on Vaughan and learned a lot more, though I don’t have time to go into much greater detail here. (Also, I’m not sure what I can add right now to what Rose George has written in her essay.) I’ll just note that there were some other key details that struck me:
Early in her career, Vaughan researched anemia and developed a treatment for it using raw liver extract, which worked wonderfully. Previously, the standard treatment had been arsenic.2 The problem was, though, that the (materially) poor Londoners to whom she administered the treatment sometimes asked her not to give it to them because it gave them an appetite, and they couldn’t afford to buy food. Experiences like this led her to a conviction that medical doctors needed to be as concerned with societal circumstances facing their patients as they were with physiological matters.
After developing more effective ways to store blood for transfusion during World War II, she and her team faced the ethical dilemma of whether and how to tell housewives whose blood donations had tested positive for syphilis that their husbands had given them the disease.
Vaughan was herself married with children—notable when the women students at Somerville College during the war were being polled by their peers on whether they intended to pursue “marriage or a career,” two mutually exclusive options.3
Vaughan saved a badly burned girl in the Blitz by administering the last-ditch, experimental field-medicine treatment of transfusing blood directly into her sternum with the biggest needle she had handy, since the girl’s skin was too ravaged for them to access a vein. It worked. Years later, the girl (Harriet Proudfoot) chose Somerville as her college at Oxford because she knew that Vaughan, its principal, had saved her life. Per George’s article: “‘So,’ said Janet Vaughan of this, ‘nice things happen.’”
What Would A Human Being Do?
On Saturday I posted about drawing little burrow worlds and how you can do the same. I had a couple of friends respond to me directly about it: my friend Taylor (who likes mice) sent me a nice message and also let me know that she shared it with a mutual friend (who also likes mice).
My friend Landon messaged me, “What an absolutely insane thing to send out,” and added, “I was laughing the whole time that you had sent it.” But he also said that he and one of his kids were going to try burrow-doodling the following day, so I’m taking this as a positive review.
I know I insisted previously that I’m not an extraterrestrial. Yet it does sometimes happen that there’s a voice in my head saying something like, “Wait, Natalie—are you sure this is something a human being would do?”
I think I’m lucky compared to some in that there isn’t much anxiety associated with this question. Likely that’s the voice’s concern. It’s saying, “A human being might think twice about the impression they’d give by doing this.” A gremlin, I guess, would be oblivious.
To state the self-evident, the only options when this voice pipes up are (1) don’t do the thing or (2) do the thing.
I’ve learned that (1) is typically the right choice if it’s something I’m not particularly invested in or which doesn’t reflect my values. Potentially weird behaviour you can’t stand behind is rarely worth it. We do live in a society.
Conversely, (2) is the right choice if I really do like the idea. The rub is that I have to go ahead and do it without a clear sense of whether it makes me appear deranged.
So—jury still out on whether a human being or a gremlin would post about doodling burrows. I hit “Publish” on spec.
Hits du jour
Some things I’ve been enjoying:
Chocolate milk! Nothing to link you to, but gosh, what a treat. And often on sale!
I’ve been listening to the Rosary in a Year4 daily podcast this year—recommended listening if you are Catholic or Catholic-curious. Host Fr. Mark-Mary recently shared a story from early in his formation as a friar. It ended with one of the more senior friars admitting to (not-yet-)Fr. Mark (after attentively listening to a local man who monologued at the two of them for over an hour), “I just don’t feel like I have a lot that I can give to people. But I can listen, and so that’s what I do.” I’ve been thinking about this—how when you perceive your own smallness, rather than resenting demands on your time, you rejoice in having anything to give someone. So many of the saints talk about the essential nature of humility in growing in charity, but I can’t remember the last example I’d seen of it that was so bright and clear and simple.
Friend Landon (he who has threatened to draw burrows with his kid) had a show opening for Steven Page (of Barenaked Ladies fame) this past weekend. I missed it! It was sold out by the time I tried to get tickets. By all accounts, it was amazing. Anyway, I highly recommend you listen to Landon’s tunes. They make me smile.
So long for now, friends.
Transcribed from an audiobook version; apologies for punctuation/paragraph differences from the print version.
??? Good grief.
This anecdote is also from Metaphysical Animals. Also worth noting, I suppose, that all four of Anscombe, Murdoch, Foot and Midgley did get married as well as pursuing their careers.
Pretty sure all the “How slowly are you praying??” jokes have already been made.